“Growing up I definitely, definitely had a bunch of things of, Um, am I black enough? — and I guess specifically, Am I German enough? Why are we measuring blackness?”
Zazie Beetz hops out of a yellow cab and right into the mosh pit of late-afternoon Manhattan traffic. She bobs from side to side, like an athlete on the field, waiting for her moment to run across two lanes. The moment comes, a split second in which the universe seems to have momentarily suspended all the cars in place, like fat globules in water, just long enough for her to slide through and dart to the other side.
At this point in my Zazie Beetz experience, the evidence seems to support all that: Even though she’s only 26, she speaks with the wisdom and thoughtfulness of someone a decade or two older. She’s been known to veer into conversational tangents about the oneness of her body, mind, and the Earth.
Sometimes it’s frustrating that the audience usually only sees Van through Earn’s eyes: She’s his girlfriend, his keeper, the only woman on the show and therefore the designated emotional laborer, the nagging force of every creative sadboy’s nightmares. Van is the one who pulls Earn toward responsibility and stability, out of bad decisions and mislaid schemes and back into the real world.
Her earth-mother pragmatism she attributes to her actual mother, a social worker who supervised programs for victims of domestic violence, among other things. “She’s grounded and she’s calm, but she’s objective. I can come to her about anything and she sees it from all sides, and she’s very gentle with it. I like that part of my mom,” she says, playing with her hair.
“Of course,” Beetz says. The man and his wife proceed to sit entirely too close, and begin to chatter loudly in Hungarian. Beetz keeps on going, though her voice is occasionally drowned out by the passionate Hungarians. “We were just, like, at a club, vibing each other, and then, you know, we were like, Oh, okay, we could hang out. So we’re kind of hanging out, right? Hanging out with each other, like, also sexually. And so we were together a couple of months, maybe.
She remembers a lunch break in middle school when someone turned on a song — she’s forgotten which one, but she still remembers how she felt. “Everybody got up and started doing this dance, and I didn’t know it. I was like ‘Oh my god!’” From that day on, she says, for a year or so after, she’d go home and watch BET. “I thought, I need to learn about myself. I’m much more comfortable with things now; I’m just trying to stay real. It’s harder, I think, than people realize.
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